I am certain no one wants this to be a homework forum. Which is why I have never tried to push the homework help thread towards this forum. I have always felt that doing so would be detrimental to the overall focus of the forum.

However, If linking the thread to the forum at least helps to advertise the forum enough to get it up off the ground a bit then I have no problem with that. Frankly Wo Daddy Wo created that thread in the first place to keep those threads out of IE, so that we wouldn't be flooded with people asking simple homework questions in a new thread everytime. But again I see no reason that advertising the forum couldn't help it. Special Interest forums are notoriously ignored anyway. The only one I can remember being a long term success was B&L/Comics. And even that one faded after I took the link out of my Sig. The best thing you can do for any forum you want to grow is to advertise it as much as possible. Within the rules of Neo and the respective forums of course.

True, but advertising really is only half the battle. You could get half of Neo to take a look at this forum and even then I'm quite confident that you'd get few more replies than we do already because they still wouldn't have any real idea what to post.

Heck, even I'm not so sure. This forum just seems to lack a purpose at the moment. I really think you'd find that something as simple as a sticky outlining the general purpose of the forum and topics for discussion would go a really long way. There seem to be a lot of people here that would be quite dedicated to making this forum work, if only we knew precisely what we should and shouldn't be doing accordingly.

I must admit that I am not entirely sure of what the focus of this forum is. In a lot of senses I can see a use for it, since even if you aren't a teacher discussing education can be beneficial; at the same time I wonder what the function of an entire forum dedicated to it really is, and what the broader appeal of it could ever hope to be.

There'll be plenty of opinions on different aspects of education, but will this forum have the pulling power to get the mix of regulars and browsers it needs? I don't really know. For now I figure try and get as many generic discussion threads as we need going (ie English: Help and Methods, where we can talk about how english is taught, good methods to learn english and can field generic english questions; etc etc), and go from there.

Wow, that was pretty unhelpful advice. Kudos Torebaa.

It's a forum to discuss matters of education; inside schools, regardless of form. More specifically, particular subjects, grading policies, issues within schools across your country (depending on what the poster may be talking about), sharing your status and classes, higher education on a general topic, and hopefully general discussions for certain subjects too.

Edit: Is this sort of like an RFS thread?

I just... I dunno. Whoever came up with the idea for this forum must have had some idea of what sorts of things they want posted here. Tbh, rather than concerning it with school as such, I think it would be best if we treated it as a place where you come to learn about particular things (i.e. actually educating rather than just talking about education). It'd sort of be halfway between I.E. and Loungin' in that respect.

I see it as a slightly differed version of IE with one main idea in mind, plus everything else it offers for discussion.

Definitely not Loungin'.

Well, it needs to have some of the appeal of Loungin' in order to keep it alive. I can't see how it will save turning it into a second I.E., which obviously won't work either. Or, like you said, an I.E. that focuses on a rather specific area. Why wouldn't you just take it to I.E.?

Because it doesn't need to. There's a forum for unexplainable discussions, one for financials, health and fitness, all of which could easily fit into Intellectual Exchanges. what discussions do you have in mind to have some of the general appeal that Loungin' does?

Things like health and fitness seem to be for posting virtually everything imaginable concerning a topic. All I'm saying is that if 'Education' is the topic, 'everything imaginable' could be really quite broad.

It can still be civilised (comparatively speaking) like I.E., but there tends to be a stigma about the standard level of conversation there. Perhaps it could be like I.E., but for the sort of people who go to Loungin'.

...As an afterthought, I distinctly remember a debating-type thread that a certain someone posted in the USA forums a little while ago that seems almost tailor-made for this sort of thing...

quote Praetorian_Lord

Things like health and fitness seem to be for posting virtually everything imaginable concerning a topic. All I'm saying is that if 'Education' is the topic, 'everything imaginable' could be really quite broad.

Exactly my point.


...At the very least for the time being, I'm of the opinion that this forum would be way better off as a sub-forum of I.E.. It could house those reference guides that Rome was talking about and more people would stand up and take notice. If it one day has the popularity to stand on its own feet then perhaps it can be its own forum. But its direction atm is almost non-existent aside from what we, the users, are bestowing it with.


Not that that's a bad thing...





...but I do believe it's not in the interests of those who created the forum.

It wasn't created randomly, Rome requested it.

Though quantity is vital for the survival of a forum, it's not the be-all and end-all. Whether or not the forum could stand on its own feet or not shouldn't be the case about now, rather concerning ourselves with contributing to it in a more meaningful way.

quote Unity

It wasn't created randomly, Rome requested it.

>< Somebody must have had some idea what they had in mind.


...Someone? Anyone?